5.0: JavaScript language packs are here 🎉

News from the JS package inclusion focus: JavaScript language packs are here! Thanks to AWESOME work by @herregroen, @ocean90, @swissspidy, @nerrad, @atimmer and @schlessera we can now translate strings in JavaScript files and distribute them via https://translate.wordpress.org. This functionality will soon be expanded to also work for plugins and themes. This is a major milestone for JavaScript development in WordPress and completes the JavaScript package inclusion focus.

Core: API to register JS translations for a script. https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45161

What’s next?

With JS language packs we have concluded the package inclusion focus. In the remaining time we will keep focus on two things:

Keep the packages up-to-date until 5.0 ships.

@herregroen will shift focus towards generating the core JS code documentation on Devhub (https://developer.wordpress.org) and making it searchable. Since this pretty much only involves meta, this is not a release blocker. But with the heaps of JavaScript that 5.0 adds to WordPress, it would be nice to have its documentation searchable and discoverable through Devhub. At the same time it would also make WordPress’ legacy JavaScript (of which a lot was documented in the last years in the JS documentation initiative) more accessible to the broader community. Work on this had already started as part of the JS docs initiative.